


With Eyes To See

by 852_Prospect_Archivist



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Episode Related: Blind Man's Bluff, Episode Related: Cypher, M/M, None - Freeform, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 00:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/791745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/852_Prospect_Archivist/pseuds/852_Prospect_Archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim decides to do something about his feelings for Blair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Eyes To See

**Author's Note:**

> My first attempt at posting, please be kind. Feedback appreciated. For G, with many thanks for her help.

## With Eyes To See

by Barbara Thomas

Author's disclaimer: Pet Fly etc. own them, not me. I wish I did, but I'm just having fun with them. No money being made. 

* * *

**WITH EYES TO SEE**

BY 

**BARBARA THOMAS**

I wish I could see him. 

Ever since he collapsed into my arms in the PD parking garage I've been 'looking' at him with all my other senses, but it's not enough. 

It could never be enough. 

I need to see him with my eyes, but I can't. 

And it's killing me. 

They took him off the ventilator a while ago, and he has started breathing on his own again. The doctors tell me he is no longer in any danger. The drug is working its way through his system, slowly but surely, and he should wake up soon. They say he was lucky not to have ingested more of it, lucky to eat only one small piece of that damned pizza. 

Lucky because, according to Forensics, there were ten to twenty times the amount of Golden on the whole thing that would kill a person. Enough to take out most of Major Crimes never mind one short anthropologist. 

Jesus! 

Only Sandburg could've been _un_ lucky enough to eat any of it, yet _lucky_ enough not to have eaten too much all at one and the same time. 

Only Sandburg! 

What is it with the kid, anyway? 

When shit like this happens, why does it always seem to happen to him? 

He isn't trained for any of this. He's an anthropologist, for God's sake a teacher a researcher an academic. He is not, as both Simon and I have told him ad nauseam, a cop. 

Does that stop him? 

Does it, hell! 

Just how many times since he started riding along with me has he puked his guts up at some blood-spattered crime scene? How many nightmares has he woken from, screaming? How often has he been scared witless, beaten black and blue, kidnapped and threatened with death, shot at, almost blown to kingdom come...? 

God knows. I certainly don't. I'm only human; I've lost count. 

And now, after today, he can add drugged and driven out of his mind to the long list. 

Yet, time after time, he keeps coming back for more of the same. 

No matter what gets thrown at him he's always there. At my back, at my side, keeping me centred, following me into situation after situation, any one of which must come close to his personal idea of hell. 

I used to wonder why he would do that. Not any more, though. 

In the beginning I believed it was because he was hyper about the Sentinel thing. I was the 'Holy Grail' he'd been searching for all his life, his passport to fame and fortune, a living, breathing subject for his dissertation. He needed to examine my reactions to all sorts of stimuli while studying my senses and me. And to do that he had to teach me to use and control the damned things, stay close to keep me focused and stop me from 'zoning out' as he called it. 

Believe me, I didn't make it easy for him. I hated what was happening to me. There were times when he made me feel like a bug pinned under a microscope. I hated that feeling and I hated him for making me feel it. 

So I fought him nearly every inch of the way, but whatever he was doing it worked. Gradually I stopped believing I was going crazy and started to believe I might just still be a human being after all. 

And it was all down to this long haired, neo-hippie, witchdoctor kid with a motor-mouth, who admitted he was winging it most of the time yet nevertheless somehow managed to do the right thing more often than not. 

_How_ he did it neither of us knew, but I resented the hell out of him for proving again and again that I wasn't as self-sufficient as I'd always thought I was. 

At least, I did at first. 

Somewhere around the third or fourth time he didn't stay safely in the truck like I'd told him to and popped up at my shoulder to haul me out of a zone, preventing me from getting my fool head blown off by the scumbags we were chasing, I discovered the resentment had changed into a kind of wondering respect. 

He was shit scared and shaking like a leaf each time, but he'd called in for backup and then ignored the rest of my order and come after me in spite of his obvious fear. He'd put his own life in harm's way for the sake of mine. 

He didn't have to be up at the sharp end of things to study me. That wasn't 100% necessary for him to do his job. He had already moved into the loft by then, for what has to be the longest week in the history of the calendar. Don't get me wrong I'm not complaining. I wasn't complaining even then; the loft was a different place for having him in it, a warmer place to come back home to after a long hard day. But he was around me a lot, both there and at work,   
thinking up test after damned test, and it seemed to me that the U hardly ever saw him. 

But he didn't have to stick to me like superglue when things got rough, did he? 

It wasn't safe. 

I told him so, rather forcibly. 

And he told me right back, even more forcibly, "You zone, man, like you have been doing, who's gonna pull you out of it? If you freeze and the bad guys kill you, who do you think they'll come after next? The geek sitting in the truck, that's who. If you think they'll leave me alive to hand out descriptions of cop killers when the cavalry comes over the hill, you need to think again. Oh no, sticking close to you is a clear case of enlightened self-interest, man. You keep breathing, so do I." 

He had a point. 

That's the problem with Sandburg: he _always_ has a point, and I hardly ever like it. I didn't like that one then and I still don't like it, but there isn't a whole helluva lot I can do about it. 

I carried on telling him to stay in the truck, though. And he carried right on ignoring me. Except when it suited him, of course, the criteria for which I've never been able to work out but which happened about once in every blue moon it seemed to me. 

I kept getting pissed at him when I wasn't realising that I actually liked the little pain in the ass, that is. Liked him, liked his company, liked his oddball sense of humour, even liked his incessant chatter when it wasn't driving me up the walls. 

I even discovered that I liked moaning at him about the mess he left everywhere. Go figure! 

Which is what I should have done, but didn't. Not then. 

Not until Lash came along. 

God! I only have to remember that psycho's name and my stomach falls right through the floor. When I think of what he did to Sandburg and what else he came within a hairsbreadth of doing my blood runs cold. 

The kid must have fought like a demon when the bastard came after him, if the wreckage of the loft was anything to go by, but he got taken anyway and it knocked the world right out from under me. 

I stood there, in the middle of the mess of what had, in a remarkably short space of time, become _our_ home rather than just _my_ home, and had what I can only describe as a 'road to Damascus' moment discovering a few things about myself. 

I didn't just respect his undoubted bloody-minded courage. 

I didn't just admire his intelligence and determination. 

And it wasn't just simple _liking_ I felt for him. 

Oh no. It was something much stronger than all of those things together, something much deeper. 

Something called love. Something called need. 

I don't mind admitting that suddenly recognising those feelings knocked the stuffing out of me. I've always been a loner. Sure, I've got friends and acquaintances; I even had a wife once. But nothing I have ever felt for any of them, not even for Caroline when we were married, comes even remotely close to what I feel for Sandburg. 

Nothing. No one else has ever made me feel like this. 

No one. Not ever. Only Sandburg. 

Without him... God! 

While Lash had him, for a blessedly short but seemingly interminable time I got an almost unbearable foretaste of what being 'without him' would be like: sheer unadulterated hell. 

I tasted it again today, in the garage while he was waving the gun about, high as a kite on Golden, and when he fell into unconsciousness. Believe me, it doesn't taste any less bitter now. 

'Without him' doesn't bear thinking about. 

Thank God, and whatever spirits there are out there looking out for a trouble-magnet Guide, that I didn't lose him today. 

I should have let him know how I feel about him long ago, but I didn't because I was too damn scared to take the risk of frightening him off. 

Not any more, though. Something tells me I couldn't do that if I tried. 

So it's time to go for broke, Ellison. 

Thank God tomorrow I'll be able to see him wake, see him smile, see him look at me the way he does: like I'm the centre of his entire world. 

And thank God more than I can say that tomorrow I'll get the chance to tell him just how much I love him. 

**END**


End file.
